Tessa Morris-Suzuk: The Forgotten Japanese in North Korea: Beyond the Politics of Abduction

[Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Professor of Japanese History at the Australian National University. She is the author of Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan's Cold War. Her most recent book, Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She wrote this article for The Asia-Pacific Journal.] For the past few years, international travelers leaving Japan’s major airports have been confronted with a written instruction as they queue in front of the passport control booths. Displayed only in Japanese, and thus aimed specifically at a domestic audience, the instruction informs Japanese people that they should “voluntarily refrain” [jishuku suru] from visiting North Korea [the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, DPRK]. This is part of the package of sanctions which was imposed on North Korea by the Japanese government in 2006, following the DPRK’s nuclear test, and which have remained in place ever since.

When I passed through Narita Airport on my way to the United States in December 2008, I found that this call for “voluntary restraint” had been joined by another Japanese official message about North Korea. The large screens in the airport waiting lounges, which generally display glimpses of alluring tourist destinations interspersed with travel health and safety advice, were now intermittently broadcasting an advertisement with imagery so striking that it seized my attention even before I grasped the message that it conveyed.

Arriving in the lounge mid-way through the advertisement, I initially saw on the screen a young man struggling to free himself from a cube of ice, within which he was frozen. This was followed by other similar images – another ice-cube contains a girl in school uniform, whose faint voice pleads, “please help me get back home”. Then the camera pans back, to reveal a map of North Korea dotted with similar ice-cubes – ten, eleven, maybe twelve of them. Next, the scene shifts to the more familiar image of Yokota Shigeru and Yoshie, the parents of young abduction victim Yokota Megumi, meeting George W. Bush in the White House; and the meaning of the advertisement becomes clear.  As the narrative explains (in both Japanese and English): “Japanese abductees are still being held by North Korea for thirty years now. The abduction issue is still unresolved. The abductees need your assistance. They need your words and actions.”¹

The figures in the ice-cubes, then, represent the Japanese citizens abducted by agents of the North Korean state in the 1970s and early 1980s. The advertisement, entitled “The Abduction Problem: Imprisoned Girls” [Rachi Mondai: Torawareta Shōjotachi] was commissioned by the Japanese government’s Headquarters for the Abduction Issue [Rachi Mondai Taisaku Honbu] and released to coincide with the arrival of foreign dignitaries and journalists for the Hokkaido Summit in July 2008, and continued to be broadcast at major airports around the country until the end of January 2009 as part of a campaign to “raise awareness” about the kidnapping issue.

The message graphically communicated by the advertisement is that many (indeed probably all) of the Japanese abducted by North Korea in the 1970s and early 1980s are alive and are being held prisoner in the DPRK. There is no hint here of the fact that it is actually unknown whether any of the Japanese abduction victims (other than those who have already returned to Japan) are alive today. At the time of Prime Minister Koizumi’s visit to Pyongyang in 2002, the North Korean government admitted to kidnapping twelve Japanese citizens, of whom (it said) only five were still alive. The five surviving abductees were allowed to make a home visit to Japan in October 2002. Despite a commitment to the North Korean government that this initial visit to Japan would be a temporary one, on the instance of the Japanese government, they remained there permanently, and were later joined in Japan by their immediate families. Wh